Posted
by
Zonk
on Tuesday February 20, 2007 @12:58PM
from the made-the-star-wars-movies-possible dept.

MattSparkes writes "Many images you see in a magazine are Photoshopped, and it's getting less and less likely that what you see at the cinema is any more genuine. In the film 'Blood Diamond', tears were added to Jennifer Connolly's face after a scene was shot. According to The Times, digital effects artists can even change actors' expressions. 'Opening or closing eyes; making a limp more convincing; removing breathing signs; eradicating blinking eyelids from a lingering gaze; or splicing together different takes of an unsuccessful love scene to produce one in which both parties look like they are enjoying themselves.' The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets."

Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what
he (she) wants to say? Isn't movie-making
mostly about suspending belief? Isn't this all make believe (not
including documentaries, etc.)?

It seems to me (and IANAD) directors have the ulimate creative
say so in movie creation. I find the manipulation in magazines
offensive, because ostensibly a picture of a model represents
reasonable facsimiles of that model, often in some context of
cause and effect of some beauty products. Distortions and
manipulations there are dishonest, and brush up against fraud.

But movies are supposed to be about make believe.
Heck, most movies these days are rife with computer graphics and
openly so. What is the nuance and difference with doctoring an
actors performance?

Most actors are what (famous, popular)
they are because they were at the right
place at the right time. Directors have a tougher case to
prove... they are ultimately responsible for the entire package
and the effects, emotions, stories, etc., their movies bring.
Their palette is more complex. I don't begrudge them their
creative license.

Actors who think otherwise, as stated in the article, can
stipulate contractually their work be preserved, but
there are few actors who warrant that honor. (I have to laugh
that Tom Cruise would stipulate that "manipulation" to make him
look better is okay, but else it's not... especially ironic from
coming from a Scientologist who interprets a world of
"datagrams".)

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm....
had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all? If the effects department can make better appearance of tears than Jennifer can why not just skip her entirely?

Depends on "before/after". Does the director decide not to get the "tear" out of Jennifer *because* he can add it later?

Or was it a case of the Director was happy with the shot in the dailies, but in editing decided it needed something else?

The latter is where the flexibility comes in along with a price-tag trade off. Is it cheaper to get Jennifer in, amidst an insane schedule that may have her on the other side of the world filming another movie, to do the one closeup? Or just turn the 48 frame (2 seconds on screen) to a computer department to fill it in.

It used to be that adding a computer effect for a scene that had no CGI was very expensive. The whole scene would have had to have been computer-scanned. Today, with digital color correction being the norm, everything's in the computer anyways so getting the 48 frames to add the feature into costs nothing.

People go to the movies to see the latest Bruce Willis or Meryl Streep flick. Stars aren't stars because they're great actors necessarily, but because people will pay to see their movies. I don't really understand it, just as I don't really understand why people pay to read the celebrity magazines, but from what I read the phenomenon is as old as movies themselves. Maybe bit players could be simulated (extras, people in the background, etc) but the main feature will be the stars. I don't think that Hollywood (or Bollywood) could or would get away from using real live humans. Even when the simulations get so real that you can't really tell, people will still want to watch people.

I'd like to think there is some remaining shred of reality in the actual acting job an actor does. I realize the various awards ceremonies (golden globe, oscars, etc.) are somewhat rigged to begin with, but this will shatter my illusions a little more. Was that actress really that good at acting, or was it post-production touch-up?

People seem to have this obsession over "authenticity," as if it matters apart from the quality of the output that they actually witness. I've seen it a lot in music, too, where it's even more ridiculous.

The mantra of an old sound engineer I used to know seem appropriate: "If it sounds good, it is good."

The 'process' is only important to other people engaged in the Art, and to yourself if you're the artist, so you know what you did right (if the output is good), or wrong (if it's crap). The audience doesn't, and shouldn't, really care. Does it matter what kind of microphone the engineer used on the kick drum, if what's on the tape sounds good? Of course not. Hell, it doesn't matter if there was a kick drum. Maybe it was just a drum machine, or a sampled sound. The only important thing is the finished composition. If it sounds good, then the process worked; if it sounds like crap, then it doesn't matter how much effort went into it, it's still crap. Likewise, it shouldn't matter whether the vocalist really hit that note, or whether they were pushed with an auto-tuner. Does the ultimate effect work? That's the real question.

Likewise, I don't particularly care whether Jennifer Connelly's tears were real or not, because I don't care whether she can actually act or not. I only care whether it appears that she can act, insofar as she does a good job in the role, and the movie is good. If the movie is good, then the process was good; if the movie sucked, I don't care whether she was a good actress or not, I still will have wasted $9.50 and two hours of my life.

The only reason why we ought to care, or pay any attention at all, to where the "quality" comes from, is so we can award credit and compensation correctly. When I listen to a song, I don't give a damn whether the musicians "can actually play," so long as what's coming out of my speakers sounds pleasant. It's completely academic to me whether that 'pleasantness' was produced by the musician on the guitar, or by the guy at the mastering house in postproduction. However, I'd prefer, if the actual artistry and skill that makes the music nice to listen to, occurs at the mixing board rather than at the guitar, that the guy at the mixing console get his name listed at the top of the CD's label (if only so I can see what else he did and find it easily).

Modern entertainment-art is not a product of any one person; it's almost always collaborative. A movie is made not just by the actors, but by the actors, writers, director, editors... everyone all the way down to the gaffers and lighting people. It's silly to try and pick out what's a product of the actor him- or herself; the important thing is the quality and enjoyability of the finished product. If it looks good, it is good. Nothing else matters.

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

It all depends on how good the digital effects artist is. Humans have very good emotional BS detectors. That is what made really good actors rare, it takes a very skilled individual to convincingly fake emotions. Now it takes a different kind of skilled individual. I haven't seen Blood Diamond so I have no idea if the tears looked fake or not. If they looked fake, they were fake. If they didn't, they were still "fake" but that's not the point.

My wife is an actress, and a very good one, and I can tell you she will NOT be happy about this. Fortunately, she is primarily a stage actress, so her skills can't be faked. I imagine people who could paint very realistic paintings were quite upset when cameras were invented. No one enjoys having one's skills made obsolete.

On the other hand, there is a certain well-known actress, somewhat getting on in years it's true, who has her own personal digital retouch artist. Any movie she is in, she hires this guy to retouch all of her scenes. He knows her face intimately, knows just what to highlight, what the diminish, what to blur, what to sharpen.

I do visual effects for a living, I've never met anybody with any qualms whatsoever about making a shot better. It's what we do!

Do cinematographers object to putting softening filters in front of camera lenses when shooting the female talent, because it's "not real?" No.

My friend Lance Williams said it best when accepting his Sci-Tech award -- "It doesn't matter if it's real, it matters if it's true."

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

As far as the movie goes, sure, the finished product is all that matters. But hollywood has a tradition of honoring participants in the creation process...a little ceremony that, if you believe the PR, is watched by over a billion people world-wide. So if Jennifer C managed to garner an Oscar nomination, whether she managed to squeeze out a few tears becomes entirely relevant. If the majority of the strong performance comes in post-production, then it's the director and visual effects artists that deserve the credit, not the actors. The time may come when actors are really models for their characters that merely provide detailed scans of their bodies and voice samples and the visual effects artists create the performance using CGI. While I'm not sure that situation will ever really happen (Americans are too much in love with celebrity gossip), the question is still an interesting one...at what point in the continuum between where we are now and a scenario when all performances are created on visual effects do we stop recognizing the talents of the actors who were only the inspiration for the character and played no part in bringing that character to life? This is almost the exact opposite of the debate over whether Andy Serkis deserved to be recognized for his acting that brought Gollum to life. The character looked nothing like him, yet the voice and movements were entirely his.

So while none of this matters much when it comes to enjoying the finished product, it is very relevant to the faux-royalty hype machine that Hollywood uses to justify the $20m+ paydays that actors receive. And that makes it very relevant to movie-goers since those $20m paydays are a big part of why it's almost impossible to find ticket prices under $10.

There's no difference between marketing print ads and movies. They're both fake, and as long as we know this there is no harm, or "fraud" as you put it.

His point is that using an air-brushed girl to advertise Avon skin care products is borderline fraudulent. No woman is ever going to look that good using those products. Heck, the woman in the magazine doesn't even look that good!

Using fake tears to make J-Lo (or whoever it was) cry is fine tuning a dramatic scene of a movie. The director isn't trying to get you to purchase any products with his changes. He's only attempting to bring the performances closer to his vision for the entertainment product. In many respects, it's like adding a coat of paint or polish before declaring the product ready for market.

Holy fuck. I can't believe you just confused J-Ho - one half of the Bennifer travesty, not to mention Gigli - with Jennifer Connelly, who plenty of us have had a thing for ever since Labyrinth (and don't even start me on Requiem For A Dream's "ASS TO ASS!" scene).

His point is that using an air-brushed girl to advertise Avon skin care products is borderline fraudulent.

Most all of marketing is borderline fraudulent. Does using product X get you all the hotties? Do models actually look that good? Are the model's eyes dilated digitally to make them more appealing? Would this really make a great gift? Are the statistics they quote really valid? Are those the only statistics available? Is BMW the ultimate driving machine?

I could go on and on.

I mean, I just got in the mail a markting scam from a credit card company that was asking if I wanted to cash a check for $20 and automatically be enrolled in some kind of protection plan for my credit card. Well, credit cards are unsecured credit. I don't have to pay them back (it will hurt my future credit, but they will not take my property like a house or car loan). They were also going to do me the favor by automatically putting my new monthly bill on my credit card (so I would have to pay intererest on top of intererest).

And it's not as if deceptive use of images (still and film) was invented with Photoshop and other digital image manipulation tools. All Photoshop does is make image manipulation faster and easier.

I do a lot of photography, and I can radically change the image by changing the position of the camera, the lighting, the composition of my shot, the lens I use, F-stop(aperture), exposure, ISO settings(sensitivity), and soforth... it goes on and on. And you can put some makeup on the model to make her skin look better. And obviously, choose a model with really great skin, and not an average user of your skin-care product. As for post-processing, I learned photography with a digital camera, but my understanding is that the entire reason it's called "Photoshop" is that many of the image manipulation techniques are the same kind of thing you could do in a darkroom if you were a competent developer. You could make the image lighter, or darker, or selectively brighten certain areas, so on and soforth. Before there was the digital Airbrush tool in Adobe, there was the physical airbrush. And how is adding a digital tear more "fake" than putting a little water on the actor's cheek?

It's faster and easier to manipulate imagery these days, but it's always been possible to manipulate images, and images have always been human creations, rather than unbiased recordings of reality.

I do a lot of photography, and I can radically change the image by changing the position of the camera, the lighting, the composition of my shot, the lens I use, F-stop(aperture), exposure, ISO settings(sensitivity),

I just want to amplify a little on what you've said here, because I'm sure a lot of people read it and thought "Yeah, but it's still a picture of what was in front of the camera".

A good photographer (I am not one, but I'm learning) can dramatically alter a scene by the way he chooses to capture it -- so much so that two different photographs of the same scene can seem completely different.

Some examples:

Camera view. The obvious way that camera angle changes the shot is by altering what is in front of the camera. From one angle, you may see a stern, impassive face, while from another you may catch the tearing eye. Sometimes, you can choose an angle that completely excludes key parts of the background or subject -- a scruffy teen violently grabbing an old woman's purse-holding hand might look very different if you can see the out-of-control truck bearing down on her.

Camera angle. More subtly, camera angle can significantly alter the emotion of a shot. Shooting portraits from an angle a little below the subject's line of sight makes the subject look larger, stronger, more confident. Shooting at a downward angle does the opposite. Profile shots can make the subject look pensive, or serene. Shooting from one side and behind, adjusting the camera angle can change the apparent set of a shoulder, changing the subject's apparent attitude. With landscapes, shooting from low on the ground emphasizes foreground space, while shooting from above emphasizes the background.

Lighting. Lighting is what photography is all about. The color, intensity, direction, tone, diffusion/flatness change everything. Shadows can obscure or emphasize elements, or even create them out of thin air. Light direction, intensity and color can do the same, hiding or applying emphasis to elements (one trick is that powerful, very diffuse lighting fills in shadows, hiding wrinkles, pimples and other blemishes), and
even more importantly can dramatically alter the emotional content of the image.

Composition. Composition is about directing the viewer's eye and about creating balance or the lack thereof. The viewer's eye tends to naturally fall first on the left or right of the image, and shapes and edges in the image can then lead the eye on the path the photographer wants it to take, highlighting details the photographer wants to emphasize and completely passing by elements the photographer wants to obscure. They're there, and if you take time to study the image you'll see them, but a more casual view won't generally spot them.

Beyond directing the eye, composition has a lot to do with the overall beauty or ugliness of the image. A nicely composed image that has balance, beautiful shape and form, laid out where the eye wants to find it, appropriate use and location of open space, comfortable grounding, etc., can be beautiful independent of what is actually in the image. A photo that deliberately violates these rules can be ugly or disconcerting. Images with beautiful composition tend therefore to highlight the positive aspects of an image, while bad composition highlights the negative aspects of an image -- making an ugly scene uglier, for example.

I'll stop here, but sharpness, depth of field, adjusting filters, lens choice, film choice, camera choice, etc., etc., etc., all can have an effect on highlighting or obscuring details and on changing the emotional tone of the image. Don't underestimate the importance of the tone, either. A smoothly textured shot of a horrific war scene, carefully soft-focused to obscure gory details and artfully composed with a beautiful balance that guides the eye away from the horror can leave the viewer with the impression that the horrors of war have their redeeming

Case in point: I'm sure Tom Cruise, Ben Afflec, etc, would be perfectly capable of being garbage men. But how many garbage men would be able to do their jobs? Although some refuse to recognize it, there are quite a few fairly complex skills actors have to master to be good. This is where the 'honesty' thing comes in. Acting is, essentially, dishonest; but it's the honesty of the performance that actors are worried about. They are paid to act, and if a computer can do half of the acting for them, then what are they supposed to do??

If the garbage man was named "Tom Cruise," any one you wanted. What those 'big name' actors have is brand power. They're marketing. In terms of skills, you can see better acting in most community theaters in any major U.S. city. (Okay, so it's not exactly garbagemen, but the skills aren't that uncommon.) But those people aren't worth anything, because nobody knows who they are, thus a movie they were in wouldn't be a guaranteed blockbuster like Cruise and Affleck. Because of the very high risk to reward ratio of acting as a career, there are doubtless lots of people in more secure lines of work, who would be better actors than those currently doing it, but who don't want to run the risk that committing to it (which is required to have a shot, basically) would involve. Not everyone who has a set of skills necessarily wants to use them.

The reason big stars get paid so much, is because they're worth even more to the movie producers. They earn their salaries, usually, in the first weekend that a movie opens; I could think of dozens of films that were utter crap, but generated wads of cash for some studio, by virtue of "star power." Thus, those people have a big market value, and assuming they can negotiate well, they get pretty close to what they're worth.

This situation isn't anything new; acting hasn't been a meritocracy of any sort in decades, if indeed it ever was. There's certainly a minimum skill level that you need to have in order to be able to do the job, but it's not that high. Luck plays a much bigger role, plus personality, people skills, and of course, connections. Once you get name recognition, it's a self-perpetuating gig; assuming you don't screw it up (by getting arrested or otherwise tarnishing your own image).

Al Pacino -- surprisingly -- was also in a very mediocre movie like that. It was called S1m0ne [imdb.com] and was about two guys creating a virtual actress who everyone thought was real. Although it had the Pacino Monologue (tm), it was overall a pretty crappy movie that I watched on the overhead monitor on an ancient 737 while stuck on a 10 hour flight. I think they killed her in the end.

Watch a sporting event such as football or especially baseball. You will see the ads placed around the stadium change. I'm not talking about those "scrolling" signs, those are real, but computer generated signs that are not really at the stadium.

I could be entirely wrong, but I always figured the transmitters were inside the giant orange triangle that they lay on the sidelines in front of the flags denoting where the line of scrimmage and where the first down point are....

An X-Y-Z co-ordinate system is used in the cameras along side the zoom state to figure out the positioning of the magic yellow line. It's been part of a few stadium stories on the History and Discovery channels.

Hmm, does this all mean that soon actors may be mere meat sacks on which to draw/animate? I suppose it is easier to use a real person as a canvas for the visual bits and then bring in good voice actors for the rest than a completely CG character. Is SAG's days numbered? Who cares? The real question is will this manipulation result in better film making? If not, it's really all irrelevant to the movie going public.

Maybe now when Lucas re-remakes the Star Wars movies, we'll see some good acting!

"Think so, I do not."

"Hayden and Natalie, much to learn about acting have they. Ewan, passable was he. But voicing over a CG character, for them would do nothing. As for Frank, just happy am I that up my ass his hand is no longer! Meheheh!"

This always makes me wonder about the courtroom. How do they prove that pictures and video are genuine?

They probably use a handsome, wet behind the ears lawyer who is very talented yet still plagued with some self doubt (usually due to some type of father issue), and who makes up for his lack of experience with heart and swagger. He typically validates or disproves said pictures/video in a moving 8 minute monologue to the jury.

Like any other evidence: chain of custody, examination by experts, cross examination of the person presenting the evidence. It's a problem the legal system has been addressing since the first time a forged document came into a courtroom.

It was no big deal the dinosaurs were added to several scenes in Jurassic Park, or that that a liquid metal man can walk through steel bars in terminator, but now the CGI has gotten so good at blending with live action it is no a moral problem. I don't know about you but I go to the movies (rarely) for entertainment. I expect to see the best possible image and scene. I really have no concern about how the images were created as long as the blend and I can't tell were the CG is. Now if I am watching the news or a documentary I might want to know about these changes. This seems more like the actors complaining that their performance was good enough as is. They have a makeup artist for their face why not a graphics person in post production. This is lame and BS.

Remember how cheesy the CGI Jabba the Hutt looked compared to the original puppet? Remember how convincingly real the original Star Wars spaceship models looked compared to more modern computer animations? Remember how the makers of Forrest Gump tried and failed to Photoshop words into the mouths of George Wallace and JFK, finally opting instead to exhume their bodies and stuff them with animatronics?

The ones that they cobbled together out of battleship models looked much better:(I don't get it. The "extended universe" folks (book covers, comics, games etc.) have for years been coming up with ships and tech that, with few exceptions, very closely fit the vibe that the original trilogy established, and they did it without manually assembling everything out of model kit parts.

Why couldn't the concept artists for the new trilogy do that? One of the biggest problems with the new trilogy--and, mind you, t

So at what point do the actor's/actress' talents become obsolete? Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor? Maybe Pixar (et al) are the pioneers on what is to come, in which everything is essentially generated virtually.

The bright side that I can see is that perhaps not having to put up with so many dumb, uneducated actors as public role models and political activists.

So at what point do the actor's/actress' talents become obsolete? Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor? Maybe Pixar (et al) are the pioneers on what is to come, in which everything is essentially generated virtually.

The thing is, good acting isn't the exclusive province of the A list. You can see some fine acting in lots of places, stage and film. My plan is to form an agency that contracts actors and actresse

There are already thousands of good and affordable actors out there. I think what the studios are willing to pay so much for is not acting skill, but cultural recognizability. The next step is for someone to create, popularize, and license not just CGI actors, but CGI celebrities - an idea already explored by William Gibson [williamgibsonbooks.com].

Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor?

You think Lindsay Lohan is actually the best actor the people that cast her can find? And Paris Hilton's got an acting job now because of her talent? 90% of people going to a movie are people that have a crush, sexual or otherwise, on one of the actors. The other 10% are going because they have nothing to do, but will come back to the actor in it's next movie once they g

Unlikely it'll change much... Hollywood chooses actors based on the popularity pull they have, not the quality of acting. Beyond a certain base level they don't care, they just want someone with a lot of fans. Since having fans usually means you're already big in the biz, is it any wonder we see the same actors over and over again? There are already plenty of great cheap actors that can't get a break. At least that's my thought.At the very least, this might make watching popular but not-so-great actors

I don't think anyone needs to worry too much about the lack of truth in movie scenes. Movies are supposed to be entertainment, and thus, most of them are fiction. We're PRESENTED with an untruth and asked to set aside what we may know or think to be true and enjoy it. As such, digitally manipulating movies to be more potent or seem more realistic (like removing breathing from a supposedly dead body) isn't really any different then watching a movie where movie special effects have made Yoda battle.

It is all acting anyway, so what difference does it make if it is enhanced by music, sound effects, lighting effects, CGI, or Photoshop? Who cares? Do we complain when we hear those fake fight sounds? You do know that a fist hitting a face in real life doesn't make a loud "crack" sound, right? It is usually more of a dull thud. But that just doesn't go over very well on film. Hell, why not complain that the actors aren't really hitting each other!?Now, if it were a documentary or something where I might exp

Actuallly, the Reuters photoshop thing was a BAD example. Reuters bought the picture from a photographer and sold it to newspapers. That's what Reuters does. The photographer, before selling it to Reuters, edited the picture. Reuters eventually found out about it, issued a retraction, and refused to buy any more photographs from that photographer. There was a mistake, but the system fixed it.
If this is a widespread phenomenom, as opposed to a one shot mistake that Reuters owned up to as soon as they found

Is this for real? It's ENTERTAINMENT. I could care less if they replaced all actors with CGI. How does 'morality' factor into any of this??? If anything, top tier actors and actresses getting $20-$40 million for starring in a film is the immoral bit here.

I have more respect for an actors that insists on a "No-post editing" clause and can proudly let everyone know that is the case.

I re-watched Castaway the other day.

Yes, Tom Hanks wasn't on an island when he goes to the top of the hill and looks around at an endless expanse of ocean (he was in a hollywood backlot) but the expression on his face made you believe he was.

With this news it appears that Hayden Christiansen might NOT have had three limbs cut off and his body burned to a crisp on a lava planet during that one-in-a-billion take for the end of Star Wars III Revenge of the Sith. I feel betrayed.

Take a glance at this video [youtube.com]. My wife and I watched this, and the other related videos, last night after I found the link on Plastic.com [plastic.com] in a discussion of Michelle Manhar's Playboy vs real-life appearance.

Certainly, I've known that images have been doctored in various media for a looong time. We've shown many such photo [glennferon.com] retouching samples [touchofglamour.com] to our 11-year-old daughter, as she's now starting to be aware of her perceived beauty.

It's no surprise that such digital manipulation is being used on the big screen.

While I don't have problems with such retouching, I do think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore. Certainly, much of anything that comes out of Hollywood cannot be taken at face value, but it's become even less genuine over the past 20 years. Before the 80's, if you saw a buxom, beautiful woman (or man, for you ladies out there), you could be much more certain that her hair color, bust size, and other features tied to "beauty" were more or less genuine. Sure, some makeup and soft lighting/focus made the ladies of that era slightly more attractive than they'd appear on the street, but damn, of most of them weren't drop-dead beautiful to begin with.

These days, with hair dyes and wigs, plastic surguery, and now digital manipulation, you can take the cannonical 300-lb fugly plumber, and whip him into a G.Q. model in under an hour with Photoshop. There's a fine line (in my mind, anyway) between the art of making people look good with some makeup, lights, and *good* photography/cinematography and just simply taking any old person, filming them by any old schmuck w/ a camera and then *converting* them to an entirely new person via post-production.

I don't know. It's hard to argue with the industry being at fault for these things, but I feel that imperfections (say, Jewel's crooked tooth) lend personality and uniqueness to a person. Erasing them from the record robs us of the *person* that's behind the image.

Wholesale digital creations, on the other hand, are slightly different than digital effects or enhancements. The Final Fantasy movie a few years back (or that first film from the Matrix shorts collection) was digital art. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park, while cool, was a special effect.

Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".

Surely there must be others out there who have make the same distinction as I do, and who are bothered by a cheapening of cinema?

As others have already commented, movies are art. Art is the selective recreation of reality -- so it darn well ought to take advantage of new technologies that allow the director to achieve his or her exact aims. The world already has enough reality -- enough mistakes and errors and malevolence and pimples -- as it is.

Nevertheless, this line from the summary is notable:

The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets.

Har.

Those who have actual moral qualms, will refrain.

Those who think they ought to have moral qualms, will talk about having moral qualms but do it anyway.

I understand the controversy quite well, at least from the actors' and actresses' points of view. Oddly enough, this comes from my first professional writing sale.

My first pro writing sale was an assignment to write a review of Myth II: Soulblighter for Computer Gaming World. I had been hired partly because of my writing talent, and partly because of my background as a Medievalist. And, just being allowed to write a feature review like that was one hell of a step for somebody who hadn't published anything more spectacular than Doctor Who fanfiction and some forum posts.

So, I wrote a review of Myth II. Personally, I thought it felt a bit too much like an expansion pack, and I said so. I wrote a sidebar about actual Medieval combat and how it compared (this was before the Total War series). And, having edited the review two or three times, I sent it in.

Thing was, it had to go before an editorial review board first. And, since it was work for hire, they could modify it however they liked. And they did - they turned my positive but not glowing review of the game and turned it into a glowing review. I figure somewhere between 30-50% of what I had written actually was in what was published. The writing style was modified to the point that I barely recognized it. The sidebar was shortened in such a way as to be historically inaccurate. And it had my name on it.

To say the least, it felt fraudulent. I certainly felt embarrassed using it as part of my portfolio for other pitches - it was a coup just to get that contract, but what was published wasn't mine. To this day a large part of me wishes they had removed my name from the final product.

So I can see why there is a controversy here. Actors are paid to act, to give a performance. When the basic performance is digitally changed (beyond, say, adding visible breath to simulate cold weather), it's no longer their performance.

Fake tears have been around since well before film: A few drops of glycerine will brim beautifully, and it has refractive qualities that real tears simply lack.

Fake everything is used in movies all the time, and always has been. Have you seen Psycho [imdb.com]? In the shower scene, that's not blood -- it's not even red. It's chocolate syrup. And in the original, unadulterated Star Wars [imdb.com], Luke's landspeeder is actually mounted on the arm of a centrifuge, with the camera at the pivot, so the desert in back really just goes around and around. Also, it was shot on Earth rather than a desert planet called Tatooine.

These tricks have been around for decades. The only thing even vaguely interesting this article says is that the faking that used to be done during a scene is now done afterwards. We don't need the old tricks anymore: They can be hacked in afterwards. All you need to do is make sure your actor has a tennis ball on a green stick to stare at, and you can chroma-key in whatever alien doohickey you care to. Think your alien needs fur instead of scales? No worries, no retakes -- you just drag and drop the right texture and you're done.

From the audiences point of view, it matters not one bit whether Ms. Connelly actually cried, or used glycerine, or had the tears added later. What matters is that we look at the screen and see sadness.

What that really means is that actors are taking steps to protect their real-world asses, because CGI will, at some point, make actual physical actors unnecessary to the production of a movie. There still may be a need for people that look like popular computer-generated characters, I suppose, so that someone can show up at the various award ceremonies. But those individuals won't command multi-million-dollar salaries.

Like every other group of professionals that has been supplanted by advancing technology, don't be surprised to see them head off to Congress at some point to try and make CGI illegal for replacing live actors in feature films. These people actually have the money to buy such law, and I fully expect they will try. They have some time to spare, because the technology isn't ready for prime time, but give it ten years.

What about make-up? Is a performance a lesser achievement because makeup was used to make a character's face look older, rather than relying solely on body language and vocal cues?

There are so many emotional cues on a person's voice and face, that I'm inclined to think that if they composited a tear onto a poor actor's face, it would still be a poor performance. A bad actor faking tears with glycerin in an eye-dropper isn't any better than a bad actor getting a digital tear.